Tuesday, January 17, 2012

the nervous character: Zeno 4

The popular stories about the introduction of various forms
of using tobacco are always about the military. It is said that
the habit of cigarette smoking passed from the Spanish soldiers, who had
learned it from Brazilians, to the French in the 1830s. However, there is
another story that locates the re-invention of cigarettes in the 1850s wars
between Russia and Turkey. A Turkish soldier, whose pipe was destroyed by a
bullet, put tobacco in the paper from the envelop of a cartouche, and smoked
it. [[Ferland, 2007] And still another claims that it was the French soldiers,
arriving with paper and tobacco, who diffused the habit in Russia. These
different stories could be sorted out by considering that the Brazilians and
Spanish may well have used a corn leaf – which is how cigarettes were described
as late as 1864 in G.A. Henrieck’s Du Tabac. There we read that cigarettes are
rolled in paper “sans colle”. Indeed, this was the technical difficulty with
cigarettes as a commodity: its fragility.

The military is mobile, and at the same time idle, which
has some effect on the form of drug that is being used. Tolstoy’s letter to his
aunt Tatiana Yergoloskaya in 1851-2, when he was garrisoned in the Cacausus,
describe the garrison life very well.
Garrisons were foyers for all the products that kill time, from gambling
to smoking to, in recent times, heroin and marijuana. Also for politics and
literature.

Here’s Tolstoy as he starts to settle in the garrison life:

"I
was at Stariy Yurt. All the officers who were there did nothing but play and at
rather high stakes. As it is impossible for us when living in camp not to see
each other often, I have very often taken part in card-playing, and,
notwithstanding the importunity I was subject to, I had stood firm for a month,
but one day for fun I placed a small stake: I lost. I began again: I again
lost. I was in bad luck; the passion for play had awakened, and in two days I
had lost all the money I had and that which Nikolay had given me (about 250
rubles), and into the bargain 500 rubles for which I gave a promissory note
payable in January, '52.”

Tolstoy, of course, was not a typical officer, and killed
time by writing “Childhood” and reflecting on the world around him. Lucien Leuwen, the hero of Stendhal’s novel,
shares some traits with Tolstoy – notably, his wealth and connections and
interior life. But Stendhal’s hero is engaged not in suppressing the Turkic
speaking mountain people on the Russian frontier, but, or so he feared, the
French speaking people on the class frontier in Nancy – as Stendhal sets his
story just after the French army had suppressed various worker strikes in Metz.
Still, the life of idleness represented by Stendhal – and the contrast with the
ambitions of the hero – takes on a very similar tone.

If killing time in the garrison corresponded with the use of
drugs, it was a different kind of time that corresponds to the popular image of
cigarettes by 1900. In a sense, this is
the same problem of weight and mass that is discussed in the preface to “The
Telegraph as a means of commerce” (1857) by Karl Gustav Knies, who compares the
‘commodities’ of things, persons, and “information” – Nachricht. Knies was one
of the first economists to recognize that telegrams, by introducing a real time
speed into the diffusion of information, had, as it were, given a premium to
the light and speedy. To come to this conclusion, Knies had to frame for
himself a sense of information that, at the time he wrote, was still lacking.
Yet he knew that the Nachricht “is obviously one of the objects in which commerce
between people is represented.” Information (or “report”), unlike thought,
requires distance – and even if one presumes to have information from oneself,
one is at least metaphorically putting oneself at a distance from oneself. More
normally, though, communication goes from a sender to a distanced receiver.
Knies points out that if we have certain information that seems timeless, or at
least doesn’t lose value in being transported from the sender to the receiver,
much of what we communicate has only a passing value – just as any other
commodity has. In other words, there is a shelf-life for reports. At the same
time, there is a double time frame, one in which the immediacy of the need to
which information corresponds may not be the same for the sender and the
receiver. These things are true about letters and oral communications – but
with the telegraph, a whole news temporal order, and a whole shift in the
social construction of ‘immediacy”, comes about on the mass scale.

In a word, the lightness and quickness of the telegraphic
message presages a different tempo in the life of human beings, which calls out
for a drug that is both speedy and that suspends speed. That was the cigarette.
It needed, however, to be technically changed. The cigarette becomes the object
of certain changes, in manufacture and marketing, that make it an exemplary
product of the turn to consumer goods in the later nineteenth century.
Famously, the development of the tobacco industry in Russia, in which a skilled
group of cigarette rollers were trained to produce cigarettes to serve a mass
market, jumpstarted the American cigarette industry, which took its real start
when James Duke enticed a number of Eastern European Jewish cigarette rollers
to move from New York to North Carolina to train a number of Southern factory
workers. Duke could not find an entrance to the cigar industry, so he chose to
enter the tobacco industry by enlarging the production and market for
cigarettes. America was famously addicted to cigars and chewing tobacco for
most of the nineteenth century: cigarettes were suspiciously European. Duke
introduced mechanisation, a new packaging method (a hard paper box), and
advertising. Although he never was able to take over the cigar industry, which
was resistant to the kind of speeded up manufacture that suited cigarettes, he
did establish a strangle hold on cigarettes by 1912.

These are all developments that made cigarettes a symbolic
accessory for the changes in the tempo of life that was being felt by urban
populations in the U.S. and Europe by 1900.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.